Rebecca West's legacy
LYONS, DONALD
Rebecca West's Legacy By Donald Lyons She was the Katharine Hepburn of letters, an outrageously dogmatic and stylish egoist who earned her arrogance by sheer intelligence, a flaming feminist who...
...it began, "There are two kinds of imperialists: imperialists and bloody imperialists...
...They stayed married, despite a fair amount of straying by both parties, until his death in 1968, whereupon West sold Ibstone and moved back to London, where she died in 1983...
...She wrote novels, but her imagination was too powerful, too colonizing, too imperial ever really to let characters breathe...
...It poses as a travel book, and it more than works on that level...
...Published in 1941 when the Yugoslavia she had come to love so absorbingly was under the Nazis and her friends there "now all dead or enslaved," the 1,200-page book is a cathedral of rapture and wonder and torment...
...Even an excellent work like Frederick Brown's Zola is awash in Freudian-familial speculation...
...After hot flings with Max Beaverbrook, John Gunther, and others, West met Henry Andrews, a courtly and cultivated banker of 35 who was a great fan of her prose...
...News & World Report, she pooh-poohed the widespread dogma that Senator McCarthy had instituted some sort of reign of terror and decried as absurd the notion that the House Un-American Activities Committee was the moral equivalent of the Kremlin...
...calling his mother Auntie, the boy grew up embittered and self-conscious about his bastardy...
...One of the books West reviewed for The Freewoman in 1912 was Marriage,, a novel by the prolific and popular H.G...
...there's no credit to be had...
...He is generally content with a quick summary and a survey of contemporary reaction...
...Despite the trendy promiscuity of that list, he has in Rebecca West: A Life (Scribner, 511 pages, $35) done a solid job of rooting in all the relevant archives and talking to all the surviving witnesses...
...A lot of what she wrote was reviews—some of it collected and rethought in books of literary criticism...
...Carl Rollyson, a professor of English at New York City's Baruch College, is a professional biographer who has done lives of Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, and Norman Mailer...
...Lately I've been carrying around a paperback of Black Lamb with a photo of the beautiful (and destroyed) bridge at Mostar on the cover...
...That said, West's life was rather more interesting than those of most writers— more readable than, say, the life of Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather...
...She insisted to the end of her life upon bearing witness to the evil of communism, refusing, for instance, to attend a luncheon honoring her old friend Paul Robeson lest she be seen as condoning his Stalinist politics...
...Writers' lives are in their books more than their days...
...But such nonsense was not stingless then, and it is to West's honor to have been its target...
...Isabella, ailing and poor, moved her three daughters to Edinburgh, where Cicily won prizes in school but preferred acting to studying...
...Plus a little strained standard-issue Freud, as when he sees the "image of Charles Fairfield" in West's writing about powerful male figures like Prospero...
...If nothing else, she was never silent and she was never dull...
...Hellman, who was herself later to make easy bucks lying about her liaisons and much else, accused West of seeking an "easy buck" by a "betrayal of what two people were together...
...She was 90 and had been complaining, "I wish I wasn't half dead and half alive, it's not good for one's style...
...The ensuing book was A Train of Powder...
...For, of course, art gives us hope that history may change its spots and man become honorable...
...It's one of those out-of-body reading experiences like War and Peace or Proust...
...Like D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West had, for all her crotchets, a near-infallible radar for what made for life and health in a society...
...Miserable" is good, but "hungry" may have been a wee bit outdated...
...West and the boy lived in a separate establishment, visited from time to time by Wells, playing Santa...
...Her language is a uniquely hypnotizing cocktail of ecstasy and pomp...
...Infuriating and intoxicating, partial and partisan, Rebecca West is looking like one of those writers who will live...
...Thus we were without even the support of innocence when we went to our windows and saw London burn: and those who see the city where they were born in flames find to their own astonishment that the sight touches deep sources of pain that will not listen to reason...
...she called him "Jaguar...
...It was the great love of her life, great but crazy...
...For example, here she is at the very end of her volcanic experiences, looking back to see if they make sense: "I now find it most natural that the Dalmatians, in peril like our own, built churches and palaces, deliberations in stone on the nature of piety and pleasure, under the seaward slopes of hills that were heavy on their crests with Turkish fortresses, and desolate to landward with the ruins of annihilated Bosnia...
...The business was selfishly and messily done by the parents...
...Lillian Hellman reviewed the book in the New York Times...
...Her most explosive run-in with the cultural commissars came in 1953 when, in a series of articles for the Times of London that were reprinted in U.S...
...She wrote a lot, and only a little will live, but that little is choice, or, as Spencer Tracy pronounces it when speaking of Hepburn in Pat and Mike, "cherce...
...Black Lamb begins with West's queerly prophetic feeling when, ignorant of Yugoslavia, she reads in 1934 in a newspaper of the assassination of its king, Alexander, in Marseilles by an agent of Mussolini...
...After exhaustive efforts to understand the man, West wound up endorsing the capital verdict against him...
...Rebecca West is the English Edmund Wilson, and it is perhaps not entirely accidental that their most passionate and exasperating books should have appeared at the close of the low, dishonest 1930s...
...On November Donald Lyons is theater critic of the Wall Street Journal...
...Where she really excelled was as a sort of philosophical reporter—a real-life role and a literary genre she more or less invented to pour her genius into...
...More than once a stranger has come up to me, looked at the picture, frowned, and said, in accented English, "It was five hundred years old, you know...
...She was born Cicily Fairfield in London in 1892 to Charles, a handsome but feckless journalist, and Isabella, a bright and educated woman...
...After World War II she became obsessed with the idea of treason...
...Instead, she got a job at a new suffragist journal, The Freewoman, and was soon writing aggressively polemical articles for its pages...
...In 1939, they bought a rural seat in Buckinghamshire: Ibstone House, a Regency pile with a farm, a great walled garden, and a view of the Chiltern Hills...
...Doubtless, she was already too strong a personality to be good at impersonating others...
...It was my good fortune to have read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon before the current wars...
...my sympathies became hers as her glorious, enthused, vividly colored, joyously populated prose washed over me...
...Her first book, a 1916 take on Henry James, is, though fitfully insightful, largely vitiated by her irritation at James's refusal to create spunky suffragette heroines like herself...
...It is the re-living of experience...
...Neither par-ent—the absentee Wells and the part-time West—admitted parenthood...
...What work of West's will survive...
...By 1923, West had put Wells out of her life and sailed off to conquer New York as a coming writer...
...I find it most natural that the Macedonian peasants should embroider their dresses, that they should dance and sing...
...30, 1911, still 18, she published her first review—of a book about women in India...
...A bit scared of what her mother would think of such language and such a tone, Cicily decided to adopt a pen name and chose Rebecca West, the name of the heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm—an emancipated vixen who, conscience-stricken by the wiles she has worked on her much older lover, commits suicide...
...What she wrongly criticized Tolstoy for—a stifling judgmentalism—disabled her own fiction...
...With great warmth and perception, though very much this side of idolatry, she makes Trollope and Proust avatars of artists respectively at home in and transcending elaborate social structures...
...We may recognize that the streets that are burned are mean and may be replaced by better, but it is of no avail to point out to a son weeping for his mother that she was old and plain...
...Isabella brought the family back to London so that Cicily could go to the Academy of Dramatic Art, but Cicily was pretty much a failure there...
...West's Serbian dithy-ramb-cum-elegy came out in 1941...
...What is art...
...The book is a vast improvement on Victoria Glendenning's cozy, chatty, defensively worshipful 1987 biography...
...The book's vil-lainess is Gerda, the life-poisoning German wife of their lovable Jewish-Serbian government-supplied guide...
...Wilson published his deluded history of socialism, To the Finland Station, in 1940...
...She saw Soviet communism as a real menace in America and the world, one that warranted severe vigilance...
...Rebecca West's Legacy By Donald Lyons She was the Katharine Hepburn of letters, an outrageously dogmatic and stylish egoist who earned her arrogance by sheer intelligence, a flaming feminist who could be very hard on the male character and yet loved men and was loved by them...
...Even the centrist Left—embodied in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.— came down on her for one or another of these heresies...
...When, in 1974, a book about West and Wells that she had cooperated with appeared, the doyenne of the hard-but-glamorous American Left was ready to pounce...
...She wrote, first in the New Yorker and then in the book The Meaning of Treason, a study of the dingy radio traitor William Joyce, aka Lord Haw Haw, who had broadcast from Berlin during the war...
...It was a brave but ominous choice, this abandoning of her given name with its oddly Wildean echoes (the two young women in The Importance of Being Earnest are called Gwendolyn Fairfax and Cecily Cardew) for that of a deeply torn "new woman...
...She also went to Nuremberg to report on the trials there and wound up refining her concept of treason as an option for death over the sane values of family and nation...
...But, like so many professional biographers of writers, Rollyson is weak on what's most important: the work...
...It was, though sexual for a time, basically a marriage of friendship, of comfort, of companionship: the classic "settling-for" after youthful passages of violent and desolating passion...
...but, characteristically, she bristled, refused to recant, and flung back as good as she got...
...This view of nationalism as life-giving got her into more trouble with the Left...
...her witness on our culture of perversion would have been invaluable...
...In 1901 Charles ran off to Africa (why was never clear...
...I did know, thanks to Rebecca West...
...She had then sided with Emma Goldman's radical rejection of Bolshevist Russia as essentially and not just opportunistically tyrannical...
...Fashions in Stalinist abuse change, and Hellman's rhetoric of venom may seem a bit quaint now, when a similar attack might cite a lack of demonstrated solidarity with welfare mothers or lesbians...
...Her best criticism is perhaps contained in 1957's The Court and the Castle...
...She was amusing about Wells's implausible female characters, finding them "the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships and colloids...
...Told she was giving aid and comfort to the Tories, she retorted that to "reject a conclusion simply because it is held by the Conservative party is to be as snobbish as the suburban mistress who gives up wearing a hat or dress because her servant has one like it...
...They traveled, most memorably to Yugoslavia...
...everybody involved was forever damaged...
...In August 1914, on the very day England declared war on Germany, West gave birth to a boy called Anthony Panther West ("Panther" was Wells's love-name for her...
...Hell-man also—in a paragraph not cited by Rollyson—attacked West's credentials as a socialist, indeed as a decent human being, saying with feigned concern, "I hope I am wrong but my mild research turns up no pleas Miss West ever made for the miserable miners of Wales, for those in the Cockney slums, for the hungry Irish, or for the servants Wells paid for...
...A meditation on society and human imperfection, the book seeks a mean between irresponsible individualism (symbolized by Hamlet and Byron) and the utopias of her early socialist mentors, Shaw and Wells...
...In 1930, they wed...
...Here she is on the blitz: Often, when I have thought of invasion, or when a bomb has dropped nearby, I have prayed, "Let me behave like a Serb," but I have known afterwards that I had no right to utter such a prayer, for the Serbs are brothers, and there is no absolution for the sins we have committed against the Serbs through our ineptitude...
...This sauciness brought an invitation to lunch at Wells's country place...
...He was to nourish a lifelong resentment principally if unfairly against his mother and would express it in wounding novels and other writings...
...She was, above all things, a writer, and she lived a writer's life of observation, solitude, conferences, negotiations with publishers, feuds, reading...
...Though theoretically a lifelong socialist—which meant little more than that she went on voting Labour—she had as early as 1924 braved the displeasure of the high English Left, incarnated in the likes of Bertrand Russell, Harold Laski, and Wells...
...But Rebecca West's greatest purchase on writerly immortality is her epic account of three voyages to the Yugoslavia of the late 1930s, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...
...Hers is in fact a seventeenth-century sort of book, sweeping up perceptions of and reflections on everything under the sun in its babbling course to the sea, like, for example, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy...
...Wells, then 46...
...The married philanderer took his time with West, but by the end of 1913 she had seduced Wells...
...She treated Whit-taker Chambers as a hero, endorsed his view of Alger Hiss, and called his autobiography Witness a "masterpiece...
...Is there something inherently Freudian about the very enterprise of biography...
...It is not decoration...
...he is working on Susan Sontag...
...It ends with an event that she makes us see as intimately related to the assassination: the London blitz...
...The book has an overarching moral plot: the spiritual and lyrical greatness of the Serbian people and culture as opposed to the half-Germanized and legalistic Slav Croats on the one hand and the effeminate torpor of the Turkified Slav Muslims on the other...
...Her beauty was in her language—and very mannered it could sometimes be...
...The book's political passions make for unsettling reading today when—in a new round of Balkan horrors as if to bookend the centu-ry—her beloved Serbs are widely portrayed as genocidal villains...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 7
